Friday, June 26, 2015

If
the Confederate battle flag is heritage and history, then it should not be on a
flagpole, where it will be faded by sun, battered by wind, drenched in rain, smudged
with dust and befouled by birds. History like that flag should be in a history
museum, carefully preserved in a glass case with climate control, right next to
all of the other dead things.

Riddle
me this: what do the Stars and Bars, the Swastika, and the Hammer and Sickle
have in common?

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Dark Snark 2:
Is it about racism or mental illness? That is a distinction without content.
Racism is a mental illness. It is an
organized insanity, and a rallying point for the insane.

Dark Snark 3: Was
this an attack on blacks or on faith? Mostly the former but with a side order
of the latter. To be precise, it is an attack on black faith; but by
Christianity’s own stated tenets, Christians are one, right?

Dark Snark 4:
The demonic nature of the massacre is ignored by both Left and Right because
the Left doesn’t believe in Hell and the Right doesn’t believe in anything
else. The former doesn’t want to admit that they’re in the same universe as
evil, and the latter doesn’t want to admit that they’re in the same party as
evil.

Dark Snark 5:
Right wingers have proposed arming preachers. But if so, then why not cut out
the middleman and found a faith that explicitly worships guns? The Church Of Weaponry;
the NRA would attend!

Dark Snark 6:
The civil war within the Right is now about Guns Versus God.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

In 2010, Scientific
American reported on SETI. They predict that in a couple of decades we’ll have
scanned tens of millions of stars; enough for a decent chance at detecting a
radio signal, if there is any to find. But they make an unwarranted assumption;
that emission of radio signals would be evidence of a technological
civilization.

I beg to
differ. It would be evidence of life, of radio-using life at that, but not
necessarily evidence of technological civilization, or even intelligence.

Our own
planet has many animals with high tech. For instance: electric eels with an
electromagnetic sense; bats and cetaceans with sonar; and birds with magnetic
compasses. So I speculate that there may be, on distant worlds, living beings
who can send and receive radio, for radar and for communication, but who do not
possess higher intelligence or technological civilization. I nickname such
beasties “Radar Bats”. They could have evolved in Darwinian fashion, or they
could be left-over biotech relics of a civilization now extinct; in either
case, radar bats could fill the sky of a world devoid of higher intelligence.

So if we
ever got complex signals from a distant world, there’d be two explanations, not
one; Intelligent Beings and Radar Bats. How to tell the difference? Perhaps by
the content. It’s hard to predict what a truly intelligent being would
transmit. An epic poem in praise of the beauty of the universe, perhaps; or a
chapter of the Encyclopedia Galactica; or a proof of Reinmann’s Hypothesis
encoded in a symphony. Who knows? But it’s easy to predict what radar bats
would fill the airwaves with: brags, threats, territorial claims, status
challenges, mating cries, courtship rites, warning signals and swarming calls.

With this
in mind, I have investigated our own planet’s radio emissions. There I have
discovered many brags, threats, territorial claims, status challenges, mating
cries, courtship rites, warning signals and swarming calls; but no cosmic
poetry, nor a single pagefrom the
Encyclopedia Galactica, nor a single note of the Reinmann Symphony.

Therefore
radio observations have yet to detect intelligent life on planet Earth.